The Hacienda(53)

“I fear it is not enough, not for you,” she once said. “One day, you will walk paths I do not understand. You must find your own way forward.”

My heart ached every time I recalled this, for I both loathed and feared the fact it was true. All I wanted was to walk the path Titi had. Even before I became a priest, it was clear I couldn’t.

I was the son of Esteban Villalobos, a Sevillan who came to Nueva Espa?a seeking his fortune and found work on Hacienda San Isidro.

And when he crossed the sea from the peninsula, he had brought his only sister.

I only saw her once. Not long after my mother died, when I was twelve years old, I returned to my father’s house in Apan after a few days spent with Titi and Paloma to find a tall woman in the kitchen. She had the presence of a bull, with broad, calloused hands, coppery brown hair, and dark eyes that sparked like gunpowder. My father called her Inés and introduced her to me as his sister; despite this, they were stiff and formal with each other. She said she had come to see him to bid farewell before returning to Spain and meant to leave for Veracruz the following day.

The next morning, after my father had left to attend the prison—part of his duties as the caudillo’s assistant—I woke to find that Inés had pulled up the edge of one of the floorboards in the kitchen and was in the midst of wedging a sheaf of papers beneath it.

I thought I had not made a sound, but she lifted her head. She went very still, locked her gunpowder eyes on me, and squinted, the corners of her eyes forming crow’s-feet.

“You,” she said. Her voice was archly matter-of-fact, as unfriendly as it was flat. “You’ve got the Devil’s darkness, don’t you?”

“I—I don’t know what you mean,” I stammered, shocked. I crossed myself for good measure. “God forbid.”

Her fair eyebrows bobbed once toward her hairline, sardonic. “Don’t lie. I knew it the moment I saw you.”

A sour feeling of shame mixed with fear washed over me. I had vexed her, though I did not know my sin nor how to fix it, and that frightened me. I watched in silence as she finished hiding the papers and thumped the wood back into place.

“Consider this your inheritance.” She patted the floorboards once; palm struck wood with a hollow, strange note. “Keep it hidden, if you know what’s good for you.”

Without another word, she gathered her belongings and left.

This. But what was it? It was barely a week after Inés left that I succumbed to curiosity and pried up the floorboard. The papers she had hidden were bound into a pamphlet, stained with age, their edges heavily thumbed with use. I had learned to read in school, and though I had little talent for it at that age, I recognized that though the glyphs on the page had the measured choreography of language, they were neither castellano nor Latin.

Behind me, the voices in the walls of my father’s house cooed. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I felt them peer over my shoulder at the glyphs, the darkness of their interest like wet mud slipping down my spine.

I took the papers to Titi that same day. Though she had never learned to read, we discovered interpreting the pamphlet Inés left did not require that skill: guided by the intuition of her own gifts, Titi was able to deduce the purpose of the glyphs. They were spells of protection and healing, exorcism and curses; Titi paired these with her own incantations and taught me how to harness the darkness she sensed in me. If Inés had owned this pamphlet of glyphs and had spoken of the Devil, then Inés herself must have also been a witch, albeit a very different sort than Titi. And whatever gave Inés her powers had been passed—either through blood, the gift of the pamphlet, or both—to me.

I had invented a way of transcribing Titi’s teachings in mexicano for myself, but when I was sixteen, my father discovered notes I had stuffed haphazardly beneath my cot in his house.

I thought I knew his temper like I knew the weather. With a flood of pulque would come predictable storms, slamming doors, raised voices. With enough patience, I could skirt the worst of it; I learned to melt into the walls as if I were one of the voices myself. But if my own temper thinned, or if I snapped back at him, I courted danger. When I tried to snatch the papers back from him, I expected to be shouted at, shoved, or struck for my trouble.

Instead, my father shrank away from me.

“They burn people like you, you know. You, Inés . . . they should burn you.” His eyes popped from his skull with fear, bloodshot but for the bright white above and below his irises. “Send you to Hell where you belong.” Sharp as a darting animal, he reached for a wooden cross on the wall, yanked it off, and flung it at me. I ducked. It struck the wall behind me with a dull thud and fell to the floor, cloven in two. “Go to Hell.”

I left for San Isidro that night. I never saw him again.

Word came from town that he packed his belongings and left Apan. Some said he meant to go north, to Sonora or Alta California. Others said he spat on the earth and swore he would return to Spain.

It was not long after that Titi insisted I go to Guadalajara. That I fulfill my mother’s dying wish by becoming a priest.

“You must,” she said as she bid me goodbye. “This is what is right.”

I was far less firm in my conviction. I was afraid of insurgents and Spaniards on the road, of bandits, of the Inquisition circling me like Daniel in the den of lions. What wisdom was there sending a damned soul straight into the Church’s jaws, when I ought to be hiding from them?